People
Professor
Current Students
- Konstantinos Athanasiou (PhD candidate, CCIS, co-advised with Prof. Wahl and Prof. Ding, 2015-)
- Majid Sabbagh (PhD candidate, 2016-)
- Ziyue Zhang (PhD candidate, co-advised with Prof. Ding, 2017-)
- Cheng Gongye (PhD candidate, 2018-)
- Xiang Zhang (PhD candidate, 2019-)
- Ruyi Ding (PhD candidate, 2020-)
- Tianhong Xu (PhD candidate, 2021-)
Collaborators
- Prof. David Kaeli, ECE, Northeastern Univ.
- Prof. Adam Ding, Mathematics, Northeastern Univ.
- Prof. Thomas Wahl, CCIS, Northeastern Univ.
- Prof. Miriam Leeser, ECE, Northeastern Univ.
- Prof. Thomas Eisenbarth, ECE, WPI
- Prof. Stefano Basagni, ECE, Northeastern Univ.
- Prof. Milica Stojanovic, ECE, Northeastern Univ.
Alumni
- Tianhong Xu, MS, April 2021 (PhD candidate)
- Saoni Mukherjee, PhD, co-advised with Prof. Kaeli, April 2020 (first job - Dell EMC, MA)
- Rasit Esrefoglu, PhD candidate, 2017-2019 (first job - Akamai, MA)
- Zhen Hang Jiang, PhD, July 2019 (first job - Facebook, WA)
- Chao Luo, PhD, May 2019 (current job - Mathworks, MA)
- Ritesh Gupta, MS, May 2019 (current job - Qualcomm, CA).
- Pei Luo, PhD, July 2017 (current job - Intel Labs, CA)
- Liwei Zhang, PhD, Statistics, co-advised with Prof. Ding, Apr. 2017 (current job - Staples, MA)
- Yu Han, PhD, June 2016 (current job - Akamai Corp. Cambridge, MA)
- Bingnan Jiang, PhD, Aug. 2015 (current job - ACT, Inc., CO)
- Juan Carlos Martinez Santos, PhD, July 2013 (current job - Associate Professor, ECE, Universidad Tecnologica de Bolivar, Colombia)
- Jian Lao, PhD candidate, 2012-2013 (Current job - Hermes MicroVision Inc., CA)
- Tiansi Hu, MS, Sept. 2012 (Current job - Cadence, CA)
- Dr. Qiasi Luo, PostDoc fellow, Sept. 2010 - Dec. 2011 (current job – Marvell Tech. Group Ltd., CA)
- Hai Lin, PhD, May 2011 (current job – AMD, Tx)
- Xuan Guan, PhD, May 2011 (current job – Assistant Professor, San Jose State University, CA)
- Colleen Finnegan (BS'2017, REU student, first job: MITRE)
- Tushar Swamy (BS'2015, REU student, now PhD candidate at Stanford University)
- Neel Shah (BS/MS'2015, REU student, now Intel)
- Ang Shen (BS'2014, now MS student at Northwestern University)
- Claude J. Manville (BS'2010, now PhD candidate in UConn)
- Jeff Wroten (BS'2006, REU advisee, first job: Harris Corporation, Maryland)
- Kolawole Ladoja (BS'2007, REU advisee REU program)
- Greg Chan (REU 2017 Summer)
- Amit Deliwala (REU 2017 Summer)
- Tom Hoang (REU 2017 Summer)
- Timothy Wong (REU 2017 Summer)
Support
- SaTC: Core: Medium: Protecting Confidentiality and Integrity of Deep Neural Networks against Side-channel and Fault Attacks - supported by NSF SaTC Medium grant
- STARSS: Small: Side-channel Analysis and Resiliency Targeting Accelerators - supported by NSF/SRC STARSS grant
- TWC: Medium: Automating Countermeasures and Security Evaluation Against Software Side-channel Attacks - supported by NSF SaTC grant
- MRI: Development of Northeastern University Marine Observatory NETwork (NU MONET) - supported by NSF MRI: NU MONET grant
- TWC: Medium: Collaborative: A Unified Statistics-Based Framework for Side-Channel Attack Analysis and Security Evaluation of Cryptosystems - supported by NSF SaTC grant
- MRI: Development of a Testbed for Side-channel Analysis and Security Evaluation - TeSCASE - supported by NSF MRI: TeSCASE grant
- Architectural support for security enhancement - supported by NSF CAREER award, Department of Education GAANN (Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need) Fellowships (available for US citizens and Permanent Residents only)
- Energy-efficient application-specific instruction set processor (ASIPs) synthesis - supported by NSF CCF grant
- Underwater sensor networks - ONR grants, NSF CRI/MRI, and UConn internal seed grant
- Side-channel attacks and countermeasures – UConn Intermediate Research Equipment Competition 2011 Award
- Mobile computing systems - UConn faculty large grant
- High performance and low power computer architecture - UConn ECE start-up grant
- Embedded system hardware/software co-synthesis - UConn ECE start-up grant
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Lab News 
 A couple of RAs and two post-doc position are available in NUEESS lab for Fall 2019 onward. These projects are in the area of hardware security, and involve deep learning as both computation tools and security target. Students with strong background in computer architecture, EDA, deep learning, are encouraged to contact the PI Prof. Yunsi Fei at yfei@ece.neu.edu with your resume/transcript/activities.
| 04.15.2020: | Saoni Mukherjee has successfully defended her PhD dissertation "A Power Modeling Approach to Protect GPUs from Side Channel Attacks", and will join Dell EMC. Congratulations, Dr. Mikherjee!
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| 02.10.2020: | Majid's paper "A novel GPU overdrive fault attack" has been accepted to DAC 2020. Congrats! Majid.
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| 02.10.2020: | Cheng's paper "Reverse engineering deep neural networks using floating-point side channels" has been accepted to DAC 2020. Congrats! Cheng.
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| 09.09.2019: | The NSF IUCRC (Industry University Cooperative Research Center) award Phase I - Center for Hardware and Embedded Systems Security and Trust (CHEST) has been made. The CHEST center is officially launched (https://nsfchest.org/). We are continuing recruiting related companies and agencies please contact Prof. Fei for more information.
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| 07.29.2019: | Zhen Hang Jiang has successfully defended his PhD dissertation "Memory-based Side-channel Attacks and Countermeasures", and will join Facebook Seattle. Congratulations, Dr. Jiang!
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| 07.12.2019: | A medium NSF SaTC grant is awarded to support our project "Protecting Confidentiality and Integrity of Deep Neural Networks against Side-Channel and Fault Attacks," led by Profs. Yunsi Fei, Shelley Lin, and Thomas Wahl.
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| 05.01.2019: | Chao Luo has graduated from Northeastern University NUEESS with a PhD dissertation "Novel Side-Channel Attacks on Emerging Cryptographic Algorithms and Computer Systems"! He has joined Mathworks, MA. Congratulations, Dr. Luo!
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| 09.01.2018: | Northeastern University will be one site of the upcoming NSF IUCRC (Industry University Cooperative Research Center) - Center for Hardware and Embedded Systems Security and Trust (CHEST), together with other five universities. Please check out details at https://nsfchest.org/. Interested companies and agencies please contact Prof. Fei for more information.
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| 09.01.2018: | One new member has joined NUEESS lab. Welcome onboard, Cheng Gongye!
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| 07.01.2018: | Three papers of our group have been accepted by ICCAD 2018. Congratulations to Chao Luo (two) and Majid Sabbagh (one)! The titles are, "Effective Simple-Power Analysis Attacks of Elliptic Curve Cryptography on Embedded Systems," "GPU Acceleration of RSA is Vulnerable to Side-channel Timing Attacks", and "SCADET: A Side-Channel Attack Detection Tool for Tracking Prime+Probe".
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| 09.01.2017: | Prof. Fei started her sabbatical leave with MIT Lincoln lab Secure Resilient System and Technology Group for the coming academic year.
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| 09.01.2017: | Two new members have joined NUEESS lab. Welcome onboard, Rasit Mete Esrefoglu and Ritesh Gupta!
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| 05.04.2017: | Two lab members have graduated and attended the graduation ceremonies and commencements of 2017. Congratulations to Dr. Yu Han and Dr. Liwei Zhang!
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| 02.14.2017: | Our paper, "A Novel Side-channel Timing Attack on GPUs," has been accepted for publication in Great Lake Symposium on VLSI (GLSVLSI)'17. Congratulations, Zhen!
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| 11.11.2016: | Two papers have been accepted as long paper for Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) 2017. The papers are entitled: "Side-channel power analysis of XTS-AES" and "Algebraic fault analysis of SHA-3." Congratulations, Chao and Pei!
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| 08.20.2016: | An NSF/SRC STARSS grant is awarded for project "Side-channel analysis and resiliency targeting accelerators". It is a project supported by both NSF and SRC, led by Profs. David Kaeli and Yunsi Fei.
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| 06.01.2016: | An NSF SaTC Medium grant is awarded to support our project "Automating countermeasures and security evaluation against software side-channel attacks". It is a 3-year collaborative project led by Prof. Yunsi Fei, Adam Ding (Math), and Thomas Wahl (CCIS) of NEU.
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| 06.01.2016: | Our paper, "Differential fault analysis of SHA3-224 and SHA3-256", has been accepted for publication in Fault Diagnosis and Tolerance in Cryptography (FDTC)'16 which is colocated with CHES 2016. It is the first DFA on SHA3 with byte-level fault models. Congratulations, Pei!
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| 03.14.2016: | Our paper, "A Stochastic MAC Protocol with Randomized Power Control for Underwater Sensor Networks", has been accepted for publication in IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication and Networking (SECON)'16. Congratulations, Yu!
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| 02.12.2016: | Our paper, "Concurrent Error Detection for Reliable SHA-3 Design", has been accepted for publication in Great Lake Symposium on VLSI (GLSVLSI)'16. Congratulations, Pei!
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| 11.09.2015: | Our paper, "A complete key recovery timing attack on a GPU," has been accepted for publication in International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)'16. This is the first of its kind of work for GPU timing attack. Congratulations to Zhen for the wonderful first year PhD study!
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| 10.05.2015: | Our paper, "TARS: A traffic-adaptive receiver-synchronized MAC protocol for underwater sensor networks," has won the Best Paper Award of IEEE Int. Symp. on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS)'15. Big applause to Yu!
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| 08.14.2015: | Our paper, "A Unified Metric for Quantifying Information Leakage of Cryptographic Devices under Power Analysis Attacks," is accepted for publication in Int. Conf. on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security (AsiaCrypt). Congratulations, Liwei!
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| 08.11.2015: | Bingnan Jiang has successfully defended his dissertation, Optimization and Management of Cyber-physical Systems - Smart Grid and Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles. He has started working with Norfolk Southern as an Operations Research Analyst. Congratulations, Dr. Jiang!
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| 07.31.2015: | Our paper, "Side-Channel Power Analysis of a GPU AES Implementation," is accepted for publication in Int. Conf. Computer Design (ICCD'15). This is the first of a kind work on power analysis attack on GPUs. Congratulations, Chao!
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| 07.28.2015: | Our journal paper, "A Statistics-based Success Rate Model for DPA and CPA," is accepted for publication in Journal of Cryptographic Engineering. This is a collaborative work between ECE and Mathematics faculty and students.
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| 05.19.2015: | Our paper, "TARS: A Traffic-Adaptive Receiver-Synchronized MAC Protocol for Underwater Sensor Networks," is accepted for publication in Int. Symp. on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS'15). Congratulations, Yu!
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| 05.16.2015: | Our paper, "Towards Secure Cryptographic Software Implementation Against Side-Channel Power Analysis Attacks", is accepted as a short paper with oral presentation in Int. Conf. on Application-specific Systems, Architectures, and Processors (ASAP'15) . Congratulations, Pei!
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| 05.16.2015: | Our paper, "Balance Power Leakage to Fight Against Side-Channel Analysis at Gate Level in FPGAs", is accepted as a poster in Int. Conf. on Application-specific Systems, Architectures, and Processors (ASAP'15) . Congratulations, Xin!
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| 04.24.2015: | Our paper, "Side-Channel Analysis of MAC-Keccak Hardware Implementations", is accepted for publication in ACM Int. Workshop on Hardware and Architectural Support for Security and Privacy (HSAP) to be co-located with ISCA 2015. Congratulations, Pei!
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| 04.2015: | Prof. Fei was elected Faculty Fellow of College of Engineering of 2015. According to Dean Aubry, "recipients of these fellowships will have demonstrated both outstanding achievement and the potential for leadership in their respective departments, COE and Northeastern, and in their discipline. "
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| 04.03.2015: | Our paper, "Traffic and Vehicle Speed Prediction with Neural Network and Hidden Markov Model in Vehicular Networks", is accepted for publication in IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium. Congratulations, Bingnan!
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| 02.05.2015: | Our paper, "Efficient 2nd-order Power Analysis on Masked Devices Utilizing Multiple Leakage", is accepted for publication in Proc. Int. Symp. on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST'15) . Congratulations, Liwei!
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| 09.30.2014: | Two papers, "Power analysis attack on hardware implementation of MAC-Keccak on FPGAs" and "Side-channel power leakage analysis of different protection schemes on AES", have been accepted for publication in Proc. Int. Conf. on Reconfigurable Computing and FPGAs (ReConfig'14). Congratulations, Pei!
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| 09.20.2014: | The paper "A delay-aware probability-based MAC protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks" has been accepted for publication in Proc Int. Conf. on Computing, Networking, and Communications, Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks Symposium (ICNC-WAHS'15). Congratulations, Yu!
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| 08.04.2014: | Our paper, "Smart home in smart microgrid: A cost effective energy ecosystem with intelligent hierarchical agents", has been accepted for publication in IEEE Trans. Smart Grid. Congratulations, Bingnan!
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| 08.01.2014: | Our paper, "HiTS: A high-throughput memory scheduling scheme to mitigate denial-of-service attacks in multicore systems", has been accepted for publication in Int. Symp. on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD) 2014 to be held in Paris. Congratulations, Mansour!
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| 05.25.2014: | Our paper, "A Statistical Model for Higher Order DPA on Masked Devices", has been accepted for publication in the prestigous conference of International Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES) 2014 to be held in Korea. This is another collaborative work with Prof. Ding in NU Math department.
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| 04.23.2014: | Our paper, "Scalable and Efficient Implementation of Correlation Power Analysis using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs)", has been accepted for publication in the 2014 Workshop on Hardware and Architectural Support for Security and Privacy (HASP) to be col-located with ISCA. Congratulations Neel and Tushar!
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| Two Openings have been filled: | 2-3 RA or PostDoc openings on hardware security analysis and systems. Research and development topics include side-channel attack analysis and countermeasures, hardware Trojans, PUFs, smart card and embedded system security. Prospective students are preferred to have background on computer hardware, including but not limited to Computer Architecture, embedded systems, and VLSI design, and also have some knowledge of algorithms. Programming skills, FPGA board development experience, and familiarity with EDA tools would be a plus. Interested people please contact yfei@ece.neu.edu with resume.
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| 04.01.2014: | Our paper, "On-road PHEV power management with hierarchical strategies in vehicular networks", has been accepted for publication in the 2014 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV'14) to be held in Michigan in June 2014. Congratulations Bingnan!
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| 03.01.2014: | Our projects and research activities have been featured in the Northeastern University College of Engineering Newsletter: http://issuu.com/northeastern/docs/eng_nu-winter201314.
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| 09.29.2013: | Prof. Fei has been the technical co-chair for EWEEK/WESS - Workshop on Embedded System Security hold in conjunction with Embedded System Week in Canada. http://www.wess-workshop.org/
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| 09.20.2013: | We have received an NSF award, "MRI: Development of a Testbed for Side Channel Analysis and Security Evaluation (TeSCASE)." It is a collaborative project under Prof. Fei (PI), Prof. David Kaeli and Prof. Miriam Leeser, all in NU ECE department. A dedicated project website will be up soon. Please stay tuned.
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| 07.26.2013: | Juan Carlos has successfully defended his dissertation, "Architectural Support for Software Security." This is a project supported by NSF CAREER award. Juan Carlos will return to Colombia to be an associate professor. Congratulations Dr. Martinez Santos and best wishes for your academic career!
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| 07.01.2013: | Our paper, "An adaptive routing protocol based on connectivity prediction for underwater disruption tolerant networks,” has been accepted by IEEE Global Communications Conf. (GlobeCom), to be held in Dec. 2013. Congratulations Tiansi!
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| 07.01.2013: | Our paper, "DSH-MAC: Medium Access Control Based on Decoupled and Suppressed Handshaking for Long-delay Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks," has been accepted by IEEE Conf. on Local Computer Networks (LCN) 2013 to be held in Sydney, Australia in Oct. Congratulations Tiansi!
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| 06.17.2013: | We just received an NSF award, "TWC: Medium: Collaborative: A Unified Statistics-Based Framework for Side-Channel Attack Analysis and Security Evaluation of Cryptosystems." It is a collaborative project under Prof. Fei (PI), Prof. A. Adam Ding of NU Department of Mathematics, and Prof. Thomas Eisenbarth of WPI ECE. NU is the leading institute.
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| 05.15.2013: | Our paper, "Micro-architectural support for metadata coherence in multi-core dynamic information flow tracking," has been accepted for presentation at the Workshop on Hardware and Architectural Support for Security and Privacy (HASP) in conjunction with ISCA 2013 in Tel Aviv, Israel. Juan Carlos is going to present it.
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| 06.07.2012: | Our paper, "Decentralized scheduling of PEV on-street parking and charging for smart grid reactive power compensation," has been presented by Bingnan at Proc. IEEE PES Innovative Smart Grid Technologies (ISGT), Feb. 2013.
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| 06.07.2012: | Our paper, "Static secure page allocation for light-weight dynamic information flow tracking," has been accepted by CASES (Int. Conf on Compilers, Architecture & Synthesis for Embedded Systems) 2012 to be held in Finland, Oct. 2012. Congratulations! Juan Carlos. Good hacking of GCC!
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| 05.15.2012: | Our paper, "A statistical model for DPA with novel algorithmic confusion analysis," has been accepted by CHES (Int. Wksp on cryptographic hardware and embedded systems) 2012 to be held in Belgium, Sept. 2012. This is a collaborative work between our lab and NU Department of Mathematics!
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| 03.19.2012: | Our paper "MURAO: A multi-level routing protocol for acoustic-optical hybrid underwater wireless sensor networks" has been accepted to appear in SECON (IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh, and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks) to be held in Seoul, Korea, June 2012. Congratulations! Tiansi.
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| 01.09.2012: | Our group homepage has found a new home at NU: http://nueess.coe.neu.edu.
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| 01.01.2012: | The postdoc fellow, Qiasi Luo, has taken a hardware engineering position in Marvell Semiconductors in CA. Good luck Qiasi!
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| 12.19.2011: | Two new members, Yu Han and Jian Lao, have joined NUEESS from UCSC/PKU. The two positions for the Spring 2012 have been filled. Welcome Yu and Jian!
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| 09.06.2011: | Prof. Fei's research lab has officially moved to Northeastern University in Boston.
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| 08.12.2011: | RA positions are available for Spring 2012!
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| 08.12.2011: | Lab will move to Northeastern University.
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| 05.05.2011: | Xuan Guan and Hai Lin have graduated from University of Connecticut. Congratulations! Drs. Guan and Lin.
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Contact
Office: 415 ISEC, Phone/Fax: (617)373-2039/8970
Lab: 460 ISEC, IoT Cluster.
Email: yfei {AT} ece.neu.edu
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